At the place where I used to work, they actually put money in the budget to get a cake for everyone who had a birthday in the same month. So the whole group of February birthday people would get a cake in their honor and everyone would be invited into the break room (on the same day of the month, say the first friday) to have cake and sing to them if they wanted to. That way, everybody who wanted to participate could, and those that did not, didn’t have to show up at all, and since there was always a crowd, the no shows were usually not missed. We would even save out pieces of cake for those employees that had to work for those 15 minutes because they were at the front desk or guards. It also made it possible to celebrate without having 6 or 7 different celebrations going on and taking up too much time.
Usually the dept of the person who’s birthday it was, would be taken out and treated (everybody in the dept. would chip in) to lunch on their actual birthday. And small token gifts were given to the birthday person.
We also used to have lots of potluck luncheons for people who were retiring or moving away and sometimes just because it was summer or Halloween, or we hadn’t had one in awhile. We had some really fun potlucks that were based on colors. Everyone had to bring a dish that was orange, for examle, so we had carrot cake, pumpkin pie, macaroni and cheese, cheetos, home made peach ice cream (one gal actually brought her ice cream maker to work) chili, fresh orange juice, cheese enchiladas, and fruit salad with mangos, oranges and cantaloupe. We also had potlucks that were based on an ethnic cuisines, so we did Mexican, and Asian (which emcompassed all sorts of good things from The Phillipines, Korea, China, Vietnam and Japan) and Italian. We were all a real creative bunch, so we had tons of great food and some of the most unusual, but delicious things ever. I was generally the organizer for these events, so I had a stockpile of paper plates, serving bowls and utensils and tupperware. It was a hoot.